Living With Music: A Playlist by Matthew Sharpe

My mother and sister are singers, and I have long taken various ways that musicians work as useful models of artistic production. One example is how one musician will cover another’s song. I like to think that songs, like stories, are little time-release knowledge-delivery systems, and the practice of covering suggests that in any given artist’s rendition of a song, some part of that knowledge remains implicit, to be actively expressed only when another artist takes up the same song.

The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that novels are, in a sense, covers (he doesn’t use the word ‘covers,’ that’s me covering Bakhtin): every literary narrator is a stylized version of someone telling about an actual event in the world; every line of dialogue references someone talking to someone else in real life; every diary entry, letter, memo, news article or bumper sticker that shows up in a novel is a cover of diary entries, letters, etc. that exist outside the novel.

Here are some of my favorite musical covers and why:

1.) The Star-Spangled Banner, Jimi Hendrix. I have sometimes played this song for my fiction writing students after playing them Kate Smith’s rendition, in order to illustrate what we in the writing pedagogy business call point of view, which means who’s telling the story and from what vantage. Francis Scott Key was a white American lawyer who composed the poem that later became our national anthem while he was a prisoner on a British ship in Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812. Jimi Hendrix was an African-American blues musician who covered it while standing on the stage of the Woodstock Music and Art Festival in the summer of 1969 during the Vietnam War. One story, two tellers, two radically different meanings.

2.) Subconscious-Lee, Lee Konitz. Konitz is a jazz alto saxophonist. Jazz musicians have been important role models for me because without meaning to be, I am an improviser — I don’t know how to plan a novel, only start one. This is Konitz’s re-imagining of Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love?” I find it helpful to hum the Porter song while listening to the Konitz, in the same way that I hope readers will be humming Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw” while they’re reading “You Were Wrong.”

3.) M.T.A., Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes. Jacqueline Steiner is my mother, where the Matthew Sharpe story began. In 1948 she was in a Boston folk group that got asked by the underdog mayoral candidate Walter A. O’Brien to come up with a campaign song. The incumbent at the time had just raised the fare on the subway by making people pay more if they exited at a station outside the center of the city. My mother and Bess naturally wrote a song about a man who had enough money to get on the train, but not to get off. They borrowed the melody of a popular country ballad called “The Wreck of the Old 97,” which was in turn based on a 19th-century folk song called “The Ship That Never Returned.” O’Brien did not win the election, but the Kingston Trio later covered “M.T.A.” and it became a hit for them.

4.) Na Baixa do Sapateiro, Catavento. This song of unrequited love was written in 1938 by the Brazilian composer Ary Barroso. Carmen Miranda recorded it that year, and it was sung by Nestor Amaral in the 1944 Walt Disney movie “The Three Caballeros.” João Gilberto added a syncopated guitar intro, which Caetano Veloso arranged for orchestra in his version. Catavento guitarist David Pulkingham rearranged the intro for three a cappella voices. This version features my sister Susanna Sharpe on lead vocals and my brother-in-law Sergio Santos on percussion.

5.) Smells Like Bootylicious, 2 Many DJs. This is technically a mash-up and not a cover, but who’s counting? The two mashed songs are Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious.” 2 Many DJs simply recognized that these two songs were destined to be played simultaneously. It is a piece of surrealism as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

6.) A Case of You, Prince. His cover of the Joni Mitchell song. A friend of mine was once at a party extolling Prince’s virtues when a man said to her, “You’re not one of those girls who think Prince is a genius, are you?” I like to imagine all that man’s fear and sorrow melting away as he listens to this song.

7.) Tísico, a man in a Guadalajáran disco in the late ’80s. Another friend reports that her companion in the aforementioned disco, when he danced with her to the Olivia Newton-John song “Physical,” substituted the word tísico, which means tubercular, as in “Let’s get tísico, tísico, I wanna get tísico.” A cover, then, is a sort of translation, and this is my favorite kind of translation or cover, wherein the interpreter, by voicing something not fully present in the original, brings forth its latent and unintended coloration.